Gedi does not announce itself. You drive along the Kenyan coast through palms, cashew trees and roadside stalls selling mangoes, turn in under the shade of the Arabuko-Sokoke forest, and suddenly there are coral-stone walls in the trees, a mosque with an arched doorway, a palace courtyard, houses with wells and sleeping niches, all roofed with branches and leaves instead of stone. This was a Swahili town, founded around the twelfth century and flourishing in the fifteenth, when it traded with the Indian Ocean world, with Chinese porcelain and Venetian glass turning up in the digging. By the early seventeenth century the people had gone. Nobody knows exactly why, and the theories, a shift of the coast, raids, or the failure of the water, have never been settled.
The forest swallowed it, and the effect today is of a ruined city under a green roof. Vervet and Sykes monkeys leap along the walls, hornbills call, butterflies drift along the paths, and a guide will point out the big baobab and the ceremonial gate, as well as the toilets, which were remarkably advanced. The silence between the stones is the real attraction, and an early morning visit, before the heat and the tour vans, is best.
The ride from Mombasa is a long day, roughly a hundred kilometres north along the coast road through Mtwapa and Kilifi, with a mix of fast, flat road, villages, speed bumps and trucks. Traffic can be chaotic around towns, and drivers overtake with optimism, so keep a wide margin. The surface is mostly good, but potholes appear after rains. Malindi, a town of more than a hundred thousand, is a few kilometres further and has plenty of fuel, restaurants and hotels, and a long beach.
Heat and humidity are heavy, so go early and drink water. The dry seasons, from January to March and from July to October, are the best times, as the long rains from April to June can turn the red earth tracks to mud. Eat fresh grilled fish, coconut rice or sweet mahamri bread for breakfast, and bring a hat and insect repellent for the forest walk, because mosquitoes and ticks do not respect history.